Who Likes Chores? #063

Is there meaning in household work?

Hello, welcome back! I'm Andy, philosophy lecturer, and today I want to tell you something about chores. These jobs that we do around the house that nobody likes, or at work—tedious, meaningless work—at least we perceive it like that. We try to get rid of it. Nobody wants to cook for an hour when instead we could be watching TV. Nobody wants to clean the house. Nobody wants to, you know, be strapped to a vacuum. And we try to buy a robot perhaps to do that and all kinds of things like that. Repetitive work, and mostly it is in the household because when it's at work, we often don't have a choice. But in the household, we have the possibility to try to get rid of it by automating it, by buying machines that will do it for us.

But I also think that there is a great value in actually not avoiding these chores. If you think about it, when you look back at how life was perhaps 500 years ago where people lived in a farmhouse at the end of the Middle Ages, what was their life have been like? They were not doing one thing like we do today. Today, you know, I'm a philosopher, so I do only philosophy. I try to avoid doing anything else. I am a car repair man, and I do only car repairs, and I don't do anything else. Or I am a houseman or a housewife, and then I don't do anything but deal with the household. But this was not how it was in the past, right? In the past, people would have done all sorts of things. The life of a medieval farmer was a lot more varied than anything that we can imagine today.

And sometimes you see TV series, you can also find them on YouTube, where you can see how farmers in old times worked. There's a beautiful series by Ruth Goodman where she shows together with other people how farmers worked in old times. And what they did was to do all kinds of work that happened around the house. They would build a house or they would build extensions to the house. They would build from scratch stables for the animals. They would build fences. They would plant trees and vegetables and gardens. They would keep animals. They would take care of the animals. They would feed them. They would cook. They would make their own clothes. They would cut the fleece of sheep and make wool and then spin it and make, you know, thread and make their own clothes. They would bake bread. They would make their own candles or their own lights from rushes. So there are all these activities that fill up the day. A medieval farmer probably did not have much free time. He was always busy. He or she, they were always busy. And from the morning until they went to bed in the night, they were doing something.

But I imagine that they had a hard life, and to make sure, I wouldn't want to go back there without health insurance, without doctors, without modern surgery, without, you know, all sorts of things that we have today—antibiotics that can save our lives and make them better, make them safer. But on the other hand, I think we are sometimes overdoing this comfort in the sense that we take away all the work. And if you take away all the work, then you're left with an empty day in which nothing meaningful happens anymore. And this is sometimes the situation we have now. We have meaningless work where we're just pushing paper somewhere or we are pressing buttons in a way that everybody else could replace us. And then we go home, and at home again, we have pressing a few buttons. We are ordering a meal. We are sitting in front of the TV. We go to bed, and this is not making us happy. This is making us unhappy. This is something that is destroying our lives because then we go to bed and we feel empty. We scroll on our phones. We don't know what to do. We feel that our life doesn't have meaning. And then we have all these problems with mental health, with anxieties, with the meaning of life, because we have moved everything meaningful out of our lives, away from our lives.

Looking at these TV shows, YouTube videos about how life was in the past, I realized that putting more of that into my life is not more work, but it is actually more meaning. And so we have started in my family to do such things like cooking every day. We never order food. We never go out. We cook our own food from scratch, and this is a very meaningful activity, and this makes me happy when I do it. I cook every day for the family, and there is this thought: What do we want to eat? And then we go by the ingredients, and then I have one hour or two every evening in which I'm sitting in the kitchen and cooking, making the food. And it is nice. You produce something, and at the end, you have the product of your work. It's a very meaningful activity in which you have the people of your family, the people you love, eat the food that you cooked, and they like it. And they say how it tastes, and you know how healthy it is because you made it, and it's not full of chemicals and so on.

So this is one thing, but we also do more things. I try to experiment with other things. For example, we sometimes make our soap, or we make mead. We make regularly our own yogurt. So these are all things that are easy to make, relatively easy, and they give you an enormous amount of satisfaction if you're able to do them. And they give meaning to your life because now I might be working in a factory where I'm pressing a button 500 times every day. But then I go home, and then at home, I am the one who creates something real. I make bread. I make yogurt. I make something for me to drink. And I can enjoy these things. I can enjoy the process of making them, and then I can also enjoy the product.

And the same is true of instead of watching something on TV, you know, you can write something. You can record a video. You can make some music. You can play music. You can learn to play music. There are so many apps that help you learn the piano, for example. You don't even need a piano. You can, you know, buy a cheap guitar or even use your phone to make some music. So there are all these possibilities to enrich our life, and many of these would be seen as chores, would be seen as things that you have to get rid of. But as the Buddhists say, you know, sometimes Buddha is in a broomstick or in some other kind of activity that you do in order to clean your house, in order to keep it nice, in order to cook food. So all these are places where you meet their Buddha in the sense that you meet the meaning of your life. You meet the thing that can make you happier and more fulfilled.

So let's try perhaps to do some chores with this mindset of trying to find the meaning and the enjoyment in it and the way it enriches us and gives us new skills and makes us better, more valuable human beings who not only sit on the sofa but they're able to actually produce something meaningful.

Thank you, and see you tomorrow.